


The Hecate Project

by Aphrael



Category: Firefly, Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M, River if you squint, Sherlolly Appreciation Week, Sherlolly Appreciation Week 2016, This story sounds horrifying when I tag it like this, Zombies, but it's actually very sweet, in a super weird way, mentions of non-consensual brain surgery, mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-26 12:20:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6238618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aphrael/pseuds/Aphrael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Sherlolly Firefly crossover written for Sherlolly Appreciation Week, day four. </p>
<p>Hecate. It's an apt title for her project - the goddess of magic and necromancy, ancient even on Earth-That-Was. But it's not her name.</p>
<p>As a research scientist for the Blue Sun Academy, Sherlock is assigned to study a captivating woman with a very unusual ability who makes him want things he didn't know he was capable of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not completely sure where this story came from, but it sprang fully-formed into my brain one day while I was driving. Then it got a lot bigger than I meant it to. There should be 3 chapters in total. Not beta-ed, so all mistakes are my own.

Her eyes are the worst part. They are a deep, pure brown that seem to crack open his chest and stare all the way to his charred and savage heart. She watches him whenever he is in the room, whatever he is doing, whatever  _ she  _ is doing. Whatever fresh hell thinly disguised as a “test” she is undergoing.

 

The worst part isn't that she stares at him, but that he can never find the blame in her eyes that he knows he deserves. 

 

All he ever sees is acceptance.

 

Kindness. 

 

Love.

 

Nothing as ridiculous or simple as romantic love (he suspects no one will or could ever be stupid enough to consider him for such an attachment). He sees the sort of love that recognizes him, accepts his faults and embraces all of him. A love that calls him home. It’s as if she has reached enlightenment and is waiting to sluff off a shell that she is already weary of. As if she merely animates it the way she does so many others. 

 

He knows he’s being appallingly sentimental, but he can't stop it. Can't even bring himself to want to stop. 

 

Hecate. It's an apt title for her project - the goddess of magic and necromancy, ancient even on Earth-That-Was. But it's not her name.

 

oOo

 

Her “pet” of the day cocks its head at him, frowning slightly past eyes that are missing an indefinable  _ something. _  “She wants me to tell you…” it stops, rasping a slow unnecessary breath through lungs that are beginning to forget their purpose. “The kindly one says you look… sad. You look sad you think no one can see you. Nî hái hâo ma? She knows what it means to look sad when no one can see you.”

 

He stares blankly into her warm brown eyes, ignoring the speaker. “You can see me.”

 

“She doesn't count,” the corpse says matter-of-factly. She says nothing. She never does.

 

oOo

 

The program isn’t what Sherlock expected. He knows the secret government-sponsored facility generously referred to as an academy is unlikely to be bathing its “students” in warm fuzzies and kittens, but he is completely unprepared for what they are actually doing. 

 

Sherlock Holmes is offered a position at the research facility straight out of his doctoral program. At 22, he is the youngest person ever to graduate from Londinium’s most prestigious university. Admittedly, he'd have graduated even sooner without the distraction of illegal prescription medications (he’d decided it was only appropriate to gain thorough first-hand knowledge of the effects of various narcotics). To his chagrin, his brother swept his drug use under the proverbial rug so that he wasn't sent down and he’d graduated near the top of his class. 

 

Sherlock receives several job offers on graduating, but the Blue Sun Academy's heady combination of secrecy, science, and categorical disapproval from Mycroft made it an easy decision. Subtly playing up his sociopathic traits and general disregard for other people on his entry psych testing had been child’s play and had ensured his acceptance for the job.

 

He has never been able to resist a secret, and every whisper he’s heard from his street contacts in Londinium’s underworld suggest that this is one of the Alliance’s very best and most interesting of them all. 

 

He is both very wrong and very right. Most interesting, definitely. Best… no. It certainly isn't that. 

 

He’d expected human testing and questionable ethics, perhaps even some casualties. Such were reasonable prices of scientific growth and the betterment of the Alliance. He himself would voluntarily risk his life for the right cause. 

 

But these weren't volunteers. Certainly they all had signed waivers on file to demonstrate that they were legally obligated to be here, but they don't want to be. Some of them are uncomfortably young. All started the program before the age of 18; the adult brain isn't pliable enough for the necessary surgeries and restructuring.

 

His first few months aren't all that bad. He’s assigned to the Hephestus project, a skinny teen who spends his days making new and exciting feats of engineering. Hephestus seems to care little that his brain is being altered in a series of micro-surgeries, or that he’s being monitored, as long as he's given a workshop. He creates terrifying weapons on a semi-regular basis, and can make a bomb out of machine scraps.

 

Sherlock can look himself in the mirror during the Hephestus project. The scientific data he is gathering is actually incredibly fascinating. He knows he’ll have to put in his dues before he’s allowed on anything as exciting as Athena or Apollo.

 

Then Jeffrey Hope gets himself nearly eaten by a zombie, and Sherlock is reassigned for at least the duration of his recovery.

 

He’s heard whispers about the Hecate project, but didn't believe them. 

 

They're all true. Hecate can actually reanimate the newly dead. 

 

He’s been warned that it's quite wrong, that watching it will make him ill. What he actually feels is closer to awe. The process is inexplicably beautiful. Hecate is pretty in an unassuming way, with long cinnamon-colored hair, fine features and creamy skin untouched by sunlight. She wears the cobalt smock that all the experiments have. Her slim build and small breasts make her appear younger than her twenty years (later, he will look into her eyes and understand that she is infinitely older). 

 

His supervisor, Dr. Shan provides detailed instructions regarding today's experiment and then joins Sherlock behind a glass enclosure. Apparently the enclosure is new - installed following Dr. Hope’s recent “accident”.

 

The corpse is a middle-aged woman: Helen Louise Ton, aged 61, cause of death acute myocardial infarction, certified 2 days ago, body donated to medical science. Hecate kneels beside her and smooths her hair, pulls the woman’s hospital gown down to cover her legs modestly. She squeezes a cold hand with seeming affection, though he is certain they never knew one another in life. Hecate has been in this facility for four years. 

 

She begins an odd sort of ritual - swipes the fingers of her left hand in a wide circle on the forehead and then touches each eye. She traces the slope of the nose and jumps her finger to the mouth with a small smile as if playing a game with a child. Her finger travels slowly (lovingly) down the slope of the neck, then chest, and then she abruptly pushes her hands together over the heart in a cruel mockery of CPR. 

 

The corpse gasps and its eyes fly open. Its heart begins to pump, blood circulates, neurons fire along old familiar paths. He knows from Hope’s data that the personality imprinted during life continued basically intact as the neural pathways created in life were resumed. The longer after death, the less personality remained. Interestingly, the only measurable difference was that every single subject to date has been unerringly faithful to Hecate. They will obey her silent orders over any other, even those they were affiliated with in life. 

 

Helen Louise Ton is no exception. She accepts the news of her demise with quiet grace. “Always knew I should lay off the red meat and cigs, but you always think you’ll be the exception.” She responds to Hecate like a long-lost daughter, speaking half of a conversation aloud, “No dear, I'm not scared. Went to worship once a week, I did.” A pause.

 

“Oh, I suppose I'd like to have retired to Conrad and met a cranky codger who can keep up with me, but we can't have everything.” A pause. 

 

“Hm… I'd have to say that would be my daughters. Cora and Reyna. Good girls, strong girls. They make me so proud.” (Later he will find a list in her quarters of the greatest achievement of every corpse she’s ever raised recorded for posterity. The entry before this one, Jennifer Wilson, just has “revenge” written next to it.)

 

After a few more minutes, Dr Shan calls a halt to the test. Hecate  _ hugs  _ the gorram corpse and then hums it to a semblance of sleep. She can't keep them running indefinitely. Her record for longest animation was 14 hours, and that was under duress and nearly killed her (a dreadful waste). This lasted less than two, but she’s visibly tired. He makes a mental note to have high-protein snacks and electrolyte-enriched beverages brought in for tests. 

 

As Helen Louise’s eyes close for the last time, Hecate brushes fingers down her face. She is oddly angelic this way, smiling sorrowfully down at the cadaver, her hair a shining river cascading her shoulder. He draws his brows together in disgust with himself. He is not a man who is given to flights of fancy.

 

oOo

 

Dr. Shan is all too happy to surrender this disturbing project to him. She wants results, but would rather collect them from afar. The potential uses of Hecate’s abilities are boundless. She could keep a politician “alive” long enough to sign vital legislation or keep public morale, or force an enemy to surrender for his people. If they can get her to raise multiple zombies, they could create an army without any of the usual human frailties (that notion gives even Sherlock the colloquial “willies”). 

 

He has no such desire to stay away. In fact, he grows more concerned every day by how much he  _ likes _ the girl’s company.  She doesn't prattle on like most people, though she does speak to him through her cadavers more and more frequently. She is intelligent. He quickly realized that she is more intelligent than most of his fellow scientists. It’s not entirely surprising - the experiments were chosen because they were already exceptional. 

 

Sherlock checks her browsing history and sees that she’s been downloading medical texts for years. Her file says she’d been planning to go into pathology before her recruitment. He begins leaving his recent periodicals in the testing area when he’s done with them. He tells himself that it's only practical to increase her understanding of the human body, but that's a lie. He does it because she always smiles when she finds them.

 

After the first month, he asks her why she attacked Dr. Hope. He thinks he knows the answer. Much of the file had been redacted, but he suspects the corpse in question had belonged to another experiment, one Hope had worked with before his demise.

 

The cadaver they are using today is a Caucasian male, mid-forties, two weeks weeks dead (they've been expanding her range). It raises its head slowly, tendons having begun to decay. “The kindly one didn't want to… to bring Jennifer back. It was too soon, and she was too angry. But he was hurting us.” He’s observed this before; he conjectures that in older corpses, personality recedes and is supplanted by hers. They normally talk about her in the third person, but strong emotion brings her personality to the forefront. “God, we just needed it to stop. I gave Dr. Hope what he wanted, brought Jennifer back, but I couldn’t control her… didn't want to stop her… she deserved....” The cadaver doesn't go on, but Hecate is willing him to understand what she won't voice, not even through a corpse.  _ Jeffrey Hope killed her.  _ Jennifer Wilson was possibly the first person in history to attempt to avenge her own murder. 

 

The corpse wheezes noisily through decaying lungs. “The kindly one doesn't want to be a killer. Not even to those who deserve death.”

 

Sherlock looks away first. He’s not certain whether he’s more ashamed that he works for Blue Sun, or that his fingers itch to break Hope himself for hurting her.

 

That night at home, he calls up the data file and stares at Hope’ bite marks and broken bones. He tries to find a report of what the man had done to Hecate to force her to animate Jennifer Wilson, but finds nothing. He wishes wholeheartedly that the zombie had eaten Hope. This dark desire confirms what he already knew: Sherlock Holmes is not a good man and no true son of the Alliance.

 

The next day, he abandons the enclosure and stands in the testing area with her. This is also when she begins to look harder at him, showing more curiosity about a living thing than she has in a very long time. The feeling is mutual.

 

They make significant progress in pushing her abilities together in the following months. Sherlock is rather smug to prove that his positive reinforcements are significantly more motivating than many other researchers’ punishments. Honestly, it's as if the idiots had slept through Psych 101. Perhaps they had; the project seemed to have attracted as many sadists as it did legitimate scientists.

 

He engages her in the process. When they are alone, he treats her more like a colleague than a research subject, aware that she is versed in scientific method. They are both aware that this is at least partially a manipulation on his part, taking advantage of her desire to be a doctor in her own right, but it is effective nevertheless. She is hungry for the life she would have had if she weren't here - for knowledge, for pure science, and to be a peer rather than a lab rat. 

 

They form an odd sort of relationship - not a friendship, he’s only ever had one of those but he knows there is too great an imbalance of power to call it that. He becomes accustomed to communicating through her bizarre interpreters, looking into her luminous eyes when he speaks but receiving his answer via cadaver. He asks her once if her Broca’s area was nicked during one of her surgeries, and if this is why she can't speak. She shrugs and changes the subject. 

 

In addition to the tests they run, Blue Sun brings in the occasional corpse they need information from. An exceedingly rich man is brought in from Liann Juin to record a seemingly-ironclad change in his will. Two “government workers” (spies) who have carried secrets of galactic importance to the grave are brought to make final reports; he is forced on both occasions to leave the room and not allowed to question Hecate later.

 

At times she seems almost like a normal girl. She should be midway through university now (or perhaps graduating early given her intelligence). He enjoys deducing her favorite colors, imagining what sort of clothes she would select for herself given the chance, what her flat would look like. He suspects she’s a cat person.

 

Then there are the moments when her mind is an alien world even to him. She assigns numbers to the other researchers, but the numbers change day-to-day. One day Dr. Frankland would be number five, the next (when she is angry), a long string of incomprehensible numbers that repeat and decrease, or that she performs cryptic equations with.

 

He watches her with the bodies. She is kinder to the dead than most living people have been to her in the past 4 years. He is the only living person she watches with any interest, and he’s not certain whether to be flattered or to worry.

 

oOo

 

Sherlock begins to dream of her. He is prone, inert. She touches his eyes, traces the slope of his nose and jumps her finger his mouth. Her hands travel slowly (lovingly) down the slope of his neck, then chest, then lower (so much lower). She kisses him, and then suddenly he breathes and presses his mouth to hers, wraps long arms around her slender body. He embraces her greedily, unreservedly, as if she is bread and he only just realized he was dying of starvation.

 

In his dreams, he was not dead before Hecate’s embrace. But neither was he alive without her.

 

oOo

 

He rereads her file again, and then again. Then he memorizes it so that he can review it as often as he likes in his Mind Palace without leaving a system record. He worries that his superiors will realize how compromised he has become. 

 

Sherlock tries to distance himself both for appearances and for his own sake. He finds opportunities to insult her - her sanity, her mouth and breasts, and her failure to raise more than one zombie at a time. He relishes the way his chest tightens when he sees her eyes fill with tears, immutable proof of his wickedness. He is dimly aware that commenting on her breasts will not convince anyone of his scientific objectivity, but hopes that the fact of his cruelty will be enough to reassure that he is one of them.

 

He is a scientist and not a good man; he is more than capable of looking into her forgiving, damning eyes every day, planning brain surgeries, and prescribing her a daily cocktail of drugs with that will increase her abilities and decrease her life-span.

 

He plots her rescue (as a mental exercise, of course). It devolves frequently into unhelpful sentiment-based speculation. If he helped her escape, would she stay with him? He’d be a fugitive too, after all. She might even speak to him. Would she be grateful? How grateful? (This is a deeply stupid thought and he cuts it off before it can devolve into pure fantasy.)

 

He knows he is missing something. He always misses something. He’s studied every aspect of Hecate’s project. From one moment to the next he decides to rescue her, to request a transfer, to just keep working. Finally, seven months to the day after he began working with Hecate, he decides that the only thing he can do is gather more information. He needs data. 

 

It is easy enough to work out the director of the program’s passcode.   For a high ranking official in a super-secret government agency, the man was shockingly predictable - his mistresses’ birthdates strung together with his dead dog’s name at the end (boring, took him 2 hours only because he had to locate the mistresses’ birth records).  

 

As soon as he is in the system, he realizes that he has already made a decision. He made it weeks ago, when a woman who had every reason in the ‘Verse to hate him had asked him if he was feeling okay. What he is doing now is seeking something to justify his actions, because what he is contemplating goes against all reason and logic. (It will take him a long time to realize that the premise he was operating from was flawed and this is the most reasonable thing he has ever done in a world that has always been broken.) 

 

A few hours later, he finds the justification he was looking for and more. The missing piece of the puzzle slams home in his brain and leaves him stupefied. He always misses something. This is just a very  _ big _ something. Staring blankly at his own teenaged face on the computer screen, he suddenly understands why Mycroft had argued so ardently against his accepting this job. 

 

There is a file for him in the staff profile certainly, but there is another older file as well.  He’d been considered for experimentation, strongly considered going by the amount of data collected on his life - school grades, personality tests, surveillance videos of him talking back to teachers and walking home from school. He’d nearly been sent a letter inviting him to the Blue Sun Academy as Hecate and Athena and all the rest had. At seventeen he’d hated school and been anxious to prove he was better and smarter than the idiots he was surrounded by. He’d have accepted in a heartbeat.  

 

He could have had the surgeries, the drugs and the conditioning, surrendering to the madness that already danced at his edges to produce an ability useful to the government. There is no official reason on file for his rejection, but he knows it all the same. Mycroft. His older brother was smart enough to read between the lines of the program, and important enough to block his entry. 

 

How many things has his brother protected him from himself over the years, he wonders, while Sherlock had complained loudly and made bad decisions? He feels a surge of affection for the brother he might never see again if everything goes to plan.

 

He and Hecate are the same. All that was left was for them to be the same far away from the long arm of the Alliance. He wasn’t sure that such a thing was possible, but he had no further doubts that he had to try. 

 

In six weeks the last and most crucial component of his plan (which has been waiting, fully formed in the deepest corners of his mind palace) will be taking shore leave in Londinium. If Sherlock Holmes is going to be a big damn hero, he’s going to need the only truly heroic person he’s ever known. He can do without the comforts of civilization, become a fugitive, and make an enemy of the most terrifying secret organization in the Alliance, but only if John Watson is by his side. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Easter if you celebrate, happy today if you don't!

  
It is surprisingly easy to poison Dr. Shan’s tea.

He finds her in her office late on a Thursday evening (she always works late into the night on Thursdays, predictable). Her short dark hair is neatly brushed despite the late hour, her face slightly waxy, washed-out from too many late nights and not enough time in the sun. _The life of a researcher._ Her coffee has gone cold beside her. She won't find it odd that he’s still here; his erratic hours have become legendary.

He is _almost_ sorry for what he is about to do. Then he remembers her name at the bottom of his file recommending his admission for experimentation. He recalls last week, when she called him into her office to imply that Hecate would be more malleable if he incorporated torture into her weekly routine. If that weren't adequate (it is), he can bring to mind dozens of staff meetings wherein she authorized brain surgeries, deprivation, torture, and the “conclusion” of an experiment that she felt had run its course. The staff call her General Shan behind her back; she is demanding and cruel even with them.

He rushes in, hair carefully pre-mussed and his face schooled into a look of excitement. “Dr. Shan, _xiètiānxièdì_! Perfect, you're still here. Come with me.” He starts to leave, then turns as if flustered. “Oh, um…please?”

“Holmes?” She scrambles to follow, as he'd known she would. The director has been pressuring her for some time to weaponize the Hecate project (full access to their emails has been very instructive).

Sherlock lopes ahead, continuing the illusion of eagerness and making further conversation impossible.

Hecate is already in the lab with three fresh cadavers. Her shoulders are clenched, right arm crossed under her breasts to clutch her left elbow. When Dr. Shan enters the room she leaps to her feet, fear in every line of her face.

He ushers his supervisor into the enclosure and locks the door between it and the testing area with a flourish. For this to work, Shan must be relaxed and confident in her domain. _Time for a little schoolyard bullying._ Cruelty always puts her at ease.

“Hecate,” he said harshly, “don't just stand there like a lump. You’re going to show the good doctor what you can do. All of it.”

She stands arms akimbo, now confused as well as scared. He couldn't risk warning her that this was coming.

He raises his voice to an angry shout. “Raise the first zombie! Idiot girl! You truly are stupid as well as dumb. Hop to.” Shan won't have missed the phrase “first zombie.” He can only hope that Hecate will play along.

She goes to the nearest cadaver and begins her ritual.

“She’s terribly slow, Dr. Shan. My apologies.” He wills Hecate to hear his subtext and slow down, and she does indeed move slowly through the ritual.

He pours pre-prepared tea into two cups. The package, clearly visible next to the pot, demonstrates this to be Shan’s favorite brand of Oolong tea. He hands her the blue cup and keeps the orange for himself.

She drinks it absently as she watches Hecate. He sips his own tea and allows himself a pleased smile, mostly hidden by his mug.

His subject finishes raising her zombie a few minutes later. The cadaver, a 73 year old male, stands complacently waiting for instructions. Hecate’s eyes flick from her creation back to Sherlock, and her nervousness returns.

“Come here,” he orders, and she complies. The zombie follows her obediently.

“Hecate, do you recognize this?” He holds up a frayed bible, the edges worn and pages well-thumbed. There are a few pages of notebook paper folded into it.

She stifles a gasp. The corpse steps forward. “Yes, that belongs to Her.”

“Hm. No, not quite. It belongs to you now, but it used to belong to your mother, didn't it? She’s a Shepard, correct?”

She nods, brown eyes wide.

“I’ll bet she gave it to you when you left for the Academy, told you it would protect you from evil or some sort of religious nonsense. Did she tell you to take good care of it?” He grins wickedly. He risks a sideways glance to Shan; she is riveted to the drama he’s presenting. Good, he is counting on her being too distracted to realize she is weakening.

“I'm sure she’d be disappointed if harm were to come to it.” He rips a page from the bible with agonizing slowness. He pretends to look at it, “Begat, begat, begat...boring! Who has time for this rubbish?” He raises his eyebrows in challenge and allows it to fall fluttering to the ground. “You can do more, Hecate. I know you can; I have faith in you. Raise the second corpse! Now!” His voice begins low and silky smooth and rises to a roar.

She shakes her head frenetically, tears in her eyes. The zombie begins to wail. “She can't! She can't do it, sir; she doesn't know how!” It continues to plead with him.

He meets her eyes steadily. “As you wish.” He rips another page from the book, carefully selected this time, and slaps it onto the glass. “This can stop anytime you like, you foolish girl.” He continues the insults and threats, watching her carefully.

The book has been highlighted and written in heavily. Her mother was an active reader. He is banking on Hecate having looked through this book frequently over the years despite the fact that she is not overtly religious.

He has highlighted a passage from Exodus in purple, a color not otherwise present in the book’s green and yellow marked pages. Her clever eyes catch the purple, focus in on the highlighted passage: “ _That day the Lord saved Israel from the hands of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians lying dead on the shore.”_

Emotions dance across her face - confusion, surprise, hope. After a tense moment wherein he worries she will give the game away, she recovers brilliantly. She sends her zombie at the glass, keening and wailing. He startles along with Shan. The corpse hits with a loud thud and immediately runs for the enclosure again. His supervisor is staring nervously at the glass, probably wondering if it will hold.

Good girl. He continues, “Come now, no need for theatrics. You know what the good Dr. Shan wants to see.” He rips a third page from the book and holds it to the glass, this time with his left hand. It is a purple-limned page from Judges: “‘ _Follow me,’ he ordered, ‘for the Lord has given Moab, your enemy, into your hands.’”_

Her eyes fly up to meet his. He flicks his eyes to his left wrist; her gaze follows. He is wearing her father’s watch; he deduces that it is perhaps her most treasured possession, and something she would mourn leaving behind. He has a few other trinkets and photos in his pockets, all the sentimental rubbish from her quarters that she’ll want with her. Her list is tucked into the bible.

She nods minutely and backs away. After a moment, her zombie ceases its assault on the glass. It smooths dead hands over ruffled hair. “ _Tíngzhî! Tíngzhî!_ You win; she will try.” She moves towards the second body in the room. She stands exactly where he’d hoped when he’d positioned the corpse. Her back is to the main security camera and she is partially blocking the body. Later, it will be difficult to tell what she is doing. He surreptitiously shoves the ripped pages into the bible and pockets it.

“Well done, Holmes.” Dr. Shan looks like a cat ready to eat the mouse it's been tormenting. Her smile is purely predatory as she watches Hecate perform her ritual. She uses a hand to fan herself. “My blood is racing. I am no longer used to such excitement! I've been telling you for ages to take a harder tactic with that girl. We could have been here months ago.”

They watch as Hecate touches each eye, traces the slope of the nose and then jumps her finger to the corpse’s mouth.

“It is about time you took all that pretentious rage and put it to good usssse…” Shan’s haughty expression drains into unease, then quickly to fear. Her mouth forms his name, but she can't force sound past her lips. The poison is as quick as he had hoped.

He can never resist a touch of the dramatic. “There was an expression on Earth-That-Was, Dr. Shan - ‘holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.’”

She crumples; he catches her and eases her to the ground. “I would say I am sorry, but we both know I'd be lying.” Nevertheless, he holds her until the life drains out of her eyes.

He lays her carefully on the ground in the enclosure and stand quickly, turning to get Hecate’s attention.

He jumps back, unnerved. She is standing inches away from him on the other side of the glass. Her brown eyes are fixed on the place Shan’s body rests though she cannot possibly see it through the metal lower half of the enclosure. Her animated corpse hisses “zero”. It falls in a heap on the ground behind her.

Sherlock forces himself to relax, and points her toward the enclosure door. He unlocks it and she step inside. This area was added hastily half a year previous and was rarely used; the Academy hasn't bothered to install additional security cameras here. No one was overly worried about watching the watchers. That will work to his advantage now.

“Hecate,” he catches her shoulders in his hands and murmurs in a low voice. “Hecate.”

She finally lifts her chin to look at him.

“I can get you out of here. We can go away, far away, all the way to the Rim. I have a plan. You have to raise Dr. Shan.”

Eyes wide with alarm, she shakes her head.

He whispers rapidly. “I know it’s too soon. I know you think her ‘soul’ is still here,” he waves a hand at this patently ridiculous notion, though it makes sense to him that newly dead be much harder to control. “But we need her.”

She continues to stare at the rapidly cooling body of the former assistant director of the Blue Sun Academy.

It occurs to him with growing horror that she might actually refuse. “Hecate,” he growls. He shakes her slightly to jar her back to reality. “Please. Do you trust me?”

He is scared of the answer. The last six weeks have not been easy ones.

oOo

Dr. Shan began strongly considering the idea of pulling him from the project over a month ago. Her email to the director indicated that while he’d made good progress, she felt he was losing scientific objectivity. She proposed reassigning him to the Ares project (ironically, it would have been a promotion).

Dr. Moran had apparently been lobbying for some time to be assigned; he wanted to try a new neural surgery that he hypothesized would increase Hecate’s abilities tenfold. Moran was a veritable butcher; his last surgery on Athena had made her brain look like a scrambled egg. Since it had also increased her telepathy significantly, Shan had been delighted. Athena’s sanity was a minor price to pay for the glory of the Alliance.

Sherlock had no intention of allowing that man anywhere near Hecate. He needed to reassure Dr. Shan of his objectivity. He had begun by ending all the liberties he’d permitted his subject - no more having her record her own data, no more joint theory postulation, and no strangely comfortable conversations about advancements in biometric cardiothoracic implants as interpreted via corpse. No more medical journals left out for her to find.- no more treating her as a fellow researcher, no more conversation about recent developments in cardiothoracic implantation. No more medical journals. He He was as cruel, as he could bring himself to be and it surprised him how difficult it was to do so. He watched her silently turn inwards as the only living person who had been kind to her in years seemingly betrayed her.

The damnable part was that it still wasn’t enough. The worst part was that this wasn't convincing enough on its own. He plotted out a line of research that would take three months to complete involving the introduction of varying levels of electrical stimulation to different areas of her brain. There was a 70% likelihood it would increase her ability significantly, though the exact nature of the enhancements were impossible to predict. He had considered the idea before, but summarily dismissed it for its potential to harm his subject. Now there wasn't a choice. His research request was granted - it projected promising results with a minimum of risk - and there had been no further discussion of transfer.

He managed to create a schedule in which most of the higher levels of electric shock likely to cause memory loss or brain damage would occur more than four weeks in the future. One way or the other, he wouldn’t be here to see it. Nevertheless, attaching electrode pads to her forehead and scalp each day without meeting her large dark eyes was a fresh sort of hell.

He would have preferred to administer anesthesia so that she was unconscious during these daily interludes, but that would have been viewed as weakness. The shocks were not as intense as they theoretically would be later, but they still hurt. She never made a noise, never struggled against the cuffs holding her arms to the reclining chair, yet he saw it in the tightening around her eyes and the clenching of her fists. The procedure produced tiny seizures in order to restructure her cerebral pathways. She briefly lost consciousness with fingers and toes twitching to show that it was working as hypothesized.

Each session was only ten minutes long and she was always confused for a few minutes afterwards as her brain rebooted. Twice, she woke up while he was removing electrode pads from her scalp and smiled blearily up at him. It did strange flip-flopping things to his chest, making him want to vomit and sing in the same breath.

He felt like a monster. He wanted to tell her, wanted so badly to give her hope, but the risk was far too great. He found small ways to show her that she still mattered - squeezing her hand as he undid her restraints, running a thumb over the places electrodes had been affixed to soothe the skin. At the start of each session he announced the level of electrical current into a recorder so that she, with all the medical research she had done, would be reassured that her brain was safe from lasting harm. There was little else he could do to warn her without giving himself away. All he could do was hope she might forgive him someday.

He wouldn't blame her if he looked into her eyes now and saw nothing at all for him.

oOo

“Hecate, please. Do you trust me?” He held tightly (desperately) to her arms.  
  
She turns her unnerving gaze and stares at him for a long moment, expression unreadable. Finally, she opens her mouth. “No.”

His mind wheels. At first he doesn’t register what she has said, only that she has spoken. Not through a corpse - she spoke with her own mouth and lungs and teeth. She has never been more beautiful than she is right now - flushed, hair loose and wild, eyes bright. _She can speak! She spoke to_ me _!_ Then he realizes the content of what she said and his heart sinks. He shouldn't be surprised after everything he has done, but it hurts.

She must see a change in his expression, because she rushes to speak. Her voice is throaty and crackles from disuse. “No. Not Hecate...Molly. Molly Hooper. I trust you.” She stands on tiptoes and presses a dry kiss to the corner of his mouth.

She turns towards the body at their feet. “Stand back. She is very angry.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> xiètiānxièdì = thank god or thank heaven
> 
> Tíngzhî = stop
> 
> Thanks for reading! Originally the escape was going to be one chapter, but it started to get quite long and I split it up.

**Author's Note:**

> *Nî hái hâo ma? = Are you okay?
> 
> I love reviews! Also, I love grammar accuracy to a slightly inappropriate degree, so if you see a mistake, please let me know and I will fix it. This was my first time writing in the present tense so I might have slipped tenses here or there. Thanks for reading!


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